


The Mousetrap

by viggorlijah



Series: Twenty-three things that did not happen to John Connor [3]
Category: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-15
Updated: 2011-03-15
Packaged: 2017-10-16 23:59:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/170762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viggorlijah/pseuds/viggorlijah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Night swimming deserves a quiet night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Mousetrap

"Teach me to swim," she says and John weighs all the things he could say before he closes his laptop and says, "Alright."

They break into a public pool. He sets a portable light in the corner of the pool, sets alarms on the doors while Cameron walks the perimeter.

"It is secure," she says. "We can begin."

The fluorescent light wavers on the pool and her shadow softens, splits into shades of grey painted on the walls as she takes off her clothes.

"Did you bring a suit?" he asks when she's standing in front of him naked. He's on one knee, half risen, half hard, the bag with towels and guns at his side. He tries to keep his gaze up on her face, not on the delicate dark curls that shadow her groin.

"No. I do not own one."

He pulls off his shirt, tosses his jeans across the bench and puts the gun on top, within reach if he grabs the step rails and throws himself. He leaves his boxers over them, so that someone coming in would think they were just teenagers skinny-dipping.

"Watch," he tells her and he raises his arms and dives into the water.

It's cold and warm and wraps around him, wet and smooth and when he breathes out, the bubbles shimmer and for a moment, he is free.

Then he breaks the surface and treads water for a moment, blinking chlorinated water and the bright flash of the light out of his eyes until he sees her again. The light hazes her outline, making her eyes gleam and her hair a drift of shadow about her pale slender frame. There are shadows where she curves, like smudges of charcoal on paper.

Then she raises her hands over her head and takes one-two quick strides and plunges into the water. She doesn't surface.

He swims down to her. She's standing at the bottom of the pool, and the water makes her hair a cloud around her face but when she reaches out her hand to him, she feels warm, and their fingers slide together, palm to palm.

He tugs gently and she walks behind him as he swims to the shallows. He rolls over onto his back, does a few lazy strokes and then just floats, waiting for her.

She walks to the end of the pool where the water hits her waist, then turns and walks back until she is within arm-reach of John, and the water washes against her breasts, her nipples sliding in and out of the water. She spreads her arms out and leans back like John.

She sinks.

When she rises up, John laughs because her hair clings to her face and there is - to him - a cant to her, of frustration and annoyance.

"I am not boyant," she says. "We should not float."

"Your skeleton might be too dense," he says. "But you might just need to practise. Try breathing in and relaxing."

"I do not need to breathe."

"Try."

She leans back and sinks again.

John can't remember learning to swim. There was always a river or a stream near the camps when he was little, and he would chase the other kids in. They knew wehere not to swim, if they were local, and sometimes they had tricks, like where to catch the frogs or how to use a branch to go over where the current picked up fast. Charlie taught him how to dive, how to tuck and turn at the end of a lap so he could make the swim team, but he can't remember learning this.

He waits till Cameron rises up again. "I don't know if you can do this," he says. "Maybe you can't."

"Teach me," she says.

"I don't know if I can," he says, and Cameron says nothing. Water drips down her face and the light flickers across the pool, a thousand tiny candles floating in the dark. He puts his hand on her shoulder, and pushes her down, and she goes down.

In the water, in the wet dark, he puts his other hand on the small of her back, spreads his figners so his hand rests against the small curves of her verterbrae, the cleft of her buttocks, and he pushes up, and she rises.

"Spread your arms," he tells her, and she does. "Spread your legs," and she does. She's heavy on his hand under her and he pushes until her back arches and her head tilts back, her face sliding under the water so all that breaks are the poles of her shoulders, the soft mounds of her breasts and the slide of her torso into the water. She is taut, a curve of metal and flesh floating in the water and his hands are at her center, holding her there.

And then he lets go. And she floats.

He swims laps, alternating front crawl with back. He tries butterfly, but he can't make the stroke come the way he remembers, the surging from the water to the fast kick.

Cameron sinks down suddenly and then stands. "I can float," she tells him. "Now I want to swim."

"Don't float like that in front of other people," he tells her. "It looked like you were dead. If you were human."

"I'm not," she says. She steps closer to him and puts her hands on his cheeks. "You're shivering," she says. "Your body temperature has fallen 1.7 degrees."

"The water's cold," he says and then she steps closer and her body is against his, the water swirling around them, heating where it's trapped between her breasts and belly and hips, and he feels his heart racing.

"Stop it," he says. "Cameron, stop it."

"Stop what," she says. "You're cold."

Her arms are around him, her small hands against his shoulder blades, holding him still. When he breathes, he smells chlorine and wet and salt, a memory of copper. He breathes and his chest shifts and her breasts move, the points of her nipples sliding over his ribs. Heat curls and aches where their hips almost touch, where the water slides by his groin.

"Cameron," he says and her face shifts and he reads something new there. Grief, or the recognition of grief, he thinks, and his throat is suddenly raw from what he does not say.

"In the future," she says, "John Connor sleeps with a girl named Marianna on March 21, 2002. She is killed two months later."

"Does he - is there anyone else for him? In the future?"

"No," she says. "John Connor is alone."

"Except for you," he says. Her arms are a warm cage around him. In the half-lit dark of the pool he is alone, and he lets the water buoy him up so that he floats in her embrace. When he bends his face to hers, to rest his forehead against hers, their skin is almost dry. Her lips are dry when he presses his to hers and she tastes of chlorine and human skin where he kisses the curve of her jaw, where he presses his tongue flat against the false beat of blood under her throat.

She rises on her toes as he settles to the curve of her breasts and then spins, water and bubbles swirling around them as they turn in the water until she is against the side of the pool, her ankles linked around his waist and their hips flush, heat and wet and Cameron's eyes steady on him as he moves within her.

"Did you, did we do this in the future?" he asks afterwards, when she is sitting on the side of the pool, watching him dress. The scratches down her back are healing as he watches, and when she rises, she is as untouched as before. His fingers have pruned from the water, and his hands shake when he buttons his shirt.

"The water is not safe to swim in," she says.


End file.
